BOOK REVIEW by Sarah Dustagheer in The Review of English Studies October 2014 (excerpt)

"It is over 30 years since Cultural Materialism and New Historicism began thinking about transgression in early modern drama and society, the crossing of sociocultural and performance boundaries and, in Stephen Greenblatt’s conceptual terms, subversion and containment. Staged Transgressions in Shakespeare’s England is a collection of 16 essays that attempts to move beyond the critical orthodoxies of the 1980s; and draws on recent scholarship in which the discussion of ‘staged transgression has split in several directions’ (p. 13), as co-editor Rory Loughnane points out. His introductory essay does an excellent job of situating the collection by analysing the influence of Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, amongst others. However, in addition, Loughnane offers a ‘necessarily inexhaustive’ (p. 14) but valuable survey of work that has increased our knowledge of ‘the minutiae of early modern English culture’ (p. 13)—for example, studies of theatrical censorship, urban life, gender, race, material culture and the body. In light of this scholarship, analysis of staged transgression requires a more subtle approach that acknowledges the variety and complexity of transgression in early modern society and theatre. And so this book offers multiple answers to the question of whether performances, practices and texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries edified or challenged the ‘governing and regulating mechanism of the elite’, or in a clear sign of the nuance of contributors’ inquiry, whether ‘these stagings give voice to something else entirely’ (p. 16). Wisely, the editors have not grouped the essays according to categories that one might expect in a book on transgression (race, gender, politics, etc), thereby leaving the reader free to make their own connections in a series of essays well worth reading in their entirety. Nonetheless, Jean Howard’s Afterword brings some of the collections key ideas together, whilst correctly insisting that ‘it takes more than one framework’ (p. 259) to consider staged transgression.[. . .]Unsurprisingly there is a heavy Shakespeare focus for this addition to this particular Palgrave series but in light of the impressive use of non-dramatic early modern writers in general more instances of placing Shakespeare in sustained dialogue with contemporary playwrights would have been welcome. Perhaps, though, such work is for others to pursue in response to what is overall a very rich, intelligent and rewarding book."

"Late Shakespeare 1608–1613, edited by Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane, assembles a largely UK and Australian group of scholars to revisit Shakespeare’s final plays, beginning with Coriolanus and ending with Two Noble Kinsmen. Proceedingchronologically, the editors prefer “cultural and historical context” to thematic, stylistic, or generic approaches to lateness. Historical topics include print history and writing practices (Grace Ioppolo), the aging of actors in Renaissance companies (Power), and Shakespeare and James I (Stuart M. Kurland). The most exciting essays in the book probe the Shakespearean text for its migration across different orders of experience. Lyne reads recognition scenes in Cymbeline in relation to cognitive theory, and Neill sounds The Tempest for its silences, arguing that Shakespeare used part lines to exploit the theatrical power of the pause. Engel uses the idea of the kinetic emblem in order to integrate stage architecture, dramaturgy, and Renaissance mnemonics and print culture in a dazzlingly comprehensive thematic and scenographic reading of The Winter’s Tale. Thomas Betteridge’s compelling argument for Shakespeare’s yearning for a Christianity not divided by confessional strife is followed by McAdam’s secular reading of the same plays as “anti-Calvinist” stagings of the possibilities of human moral agency within the “exigencies of the natural and social orders” (p. 249). The “late Shakespeare” that emerges from this strong collection is a deeply thoughtful, morally and theologically complex, and dramaturgically inventive playwright whose final plays reward multidimensional forms of critical attention."

"Scholars continue to test the international dimensions of early modern drama, whether this means mapping the internal divisions of language, religion, and culture within the British Isles, exploring England’s rivalry with and debt to Spain, or tracking global responses to Shakespearean drama. Beginning close to home, Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers , edited by Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane, takes an “archipelagic” view of greater Britain and its “rim” and “fringes.” Key here is the Celtic paradigm, a designation that convenes Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also Cornwall, Brittany, and even France more generally in a shared geocultural tradition. John Kerrigan’s astonishingly substantive prologue lays out the history, conceptual parameters, and critical stakes of the Celtic frame, including its successive development in the centuries after Shakespeare and the invention of Shakespeare himself as a Celtic-style “bard.” The editors reinforce the Celtic idea in their introduction, and Richard Wilson ends the volume with a Welsh farewell. The intervening essays, however, tend to emphasize one or the other group or region (Ireland in Othello , the Scots in the Henriad ) or address the political unity of Great Britain without necessarily developing its Celtic dimensions (Nicholas McDowell on Milton’s Shakespeare). Nonetheless, the volume as a whole gathers up the composite character of the British Isles and the crossovers and contests holding them together in a manner not attempted in previous volumes. Special pleasures include Stewart Mottram on ruins in Cymbelineand Rob Doggett on the impasses of Irish cosmopolitanism."BOOK REVIEW by Dermot Cavanagh in Scottish Literary Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Autumn/Winter 2014, pp. 146-8

"In this invigorating collection of essays, the contributors explore the diverse ways in which Shakespeare’s works respond to what John Kerrigan terms ‘the Celtic-Saxon-British geopolitics of the three kingdoms’ (p. xli). The volume also considers the subsequent afterlife and reception of Shakespeare, especially in Ireland. These interpretations are broadly inspired by ‘the new British history’, inaugurated by J. G. A. Pocock, which emphasises the interrelationships between Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales as constituent parts of a multi-nation state. In Pocock’s own influential formulation, this means viewing both the past (and the future) of ‘Britain’ as part of ‘a problematic and uncompleted experiment in the creation and interaction of several nations’. This approach has had a significant impact on the study of early modern writing -- notably in John Kerrigan’s influential Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics, 1603-1707 (2008) -- and, specifically, on Shakespeare studies. In the latter, a new range of contexts and subtexts have been explored to show how the plays and poems engage with the 'British problem’.[. . .]In their own clear and forceful introduction, the editors present a genealogy of the term ‘Celtic’, a word Shakespeare nowhere uses, to show the distinct and sometimes conflicting ways in which this term has been defined.[. . .]Rory Loughnane considers the complex implications of the allusions to Wales used by the Old Lady, Anne Bullen’s attendant and confidant in Henry VIII.[. . .]It is a sign of how valuable and thought-provoking this collection is that many of the essays possess wider implications for early modern drama that should also be explored."

BOOK REVIEW by Thea Cervone in Eolas (2014), 119-122, excerpt:

"Celtic Shakespeare is an informed and helpful book that satisfies a definite need in Shakespeare studies. It provides a discussion of Shakespeare's Irish, Scottish, and Welsh characters in terms of the relationship between Celtic ethnic identity and the values of Elizabethan/Jacobean England. The authors are successful in their analyses of the characters in the context of their respective plays, but they also succeed in connecting Shakespeare's characterizations to large social, political and religious issues that stem from England's relationships with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.Maley and Loughnane begin with a short analysis of "Celticness" as a difficult concept: what it was once thought to be, what it has over the years pretended to be, and what it is not. They connect this discussion to Shakespeare's day, identifying a range of perspectives on what it meant for something or someone to be Celtic. There's a pragmatic attempt to find a definition, first from the OED, then from older lexicographers, and early modern historiographers who made an attempt to define it; nevertheless, the search for a satisfactory definition does show that they term is, as they say, flexible and vexing to the extent that one might be tempted to look it up once and for all. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't help much. What does help is the further distinction that what it was considered to be Celtic in Shakespeare's day is different than what it might be today. The book is heavy on distinctions and definition, but its contributors employ them with good reason.[. . .]Rory Loughnane's chapter on Henry VII considers a play that is too often overlooked. He focuses on the character of the Old Lady, whose minor presence in the play nonetheless reflects on larger issues, namely, Elizabethan/Jacobean stereotypes about Welsh women and their power to emasculate English men and Ann Boleyn's stereotyped desire to do the same. Both Anne Boleyn and sterotyped Welsh women are also associated with being wild and difficult, if not impossible, to govern. The Old Lady's sexual puns carry a political context that associates the dual threat with which both Anne Boleyn and the Welsh were associated."

Celtic Shakespeare, edited by Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane, is a comprehensive, thought-provoking collection and a significant statement in the field of Shakespeare studies and archipelagic studies more widely. While the collection follows on from Shakespeare and Scotland (2005), Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to theAssembly (2010), and This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (2010), Celtic Shakespeare and its multi-national perspective fills a noticeable gap in the field. The collection is influenced by J.G.A. Pocock’s “British history” and latterly by the work of John Kerrigan who fittingly provides the prologue to this rich edition. In addition to a prologue, epilogue and introduction there are fourteen chapters split into chronological parts: (1) Tudor Reflections (2) Stuart Revisions and (3) Celtic Afterlives. Due to the scope of the collection and the constraints of the word count this review is unable to represent all of the excellent contributions; its intention therefore is to provide an archipelagic sample.

[. . .] Rory Loughnane’s “‘I myself would for Caernarfonshire’: The Old Lady in King Henry VIII” explores the character of the Old Lady and her relationship toAnne Bullen. Though the character appears only twice her references to Wales, Loughnane suggests, are narratively and dramatically linked toAnne’s promotion to Marchioness of Pembroke (185). Loughnane contends that the Welsh allusions imply two possible routes to preferment for women – “whore or mother” (186). Loughnane then considers the sexual allusion in terms of existing stereotypical views of Welshwomen whose purported wicked sexuality can be seen in Holinshed’s chronicles which recount gruesome acts perpetrated on the dead bodies of Englishmen. While the Scots were largely perceived as soldiers, the Welsh were “feminized” and a threat to English masculinity. Loughnane locates this violent-sexual relationship between England and Wales within the body of Anne Bullen and the domination of it by England (186). Wales is seen as “emasculative yet fertile” (186). Elsewhere, Loughnane notes, Christopher Highley has argued that the play represents the Celtic nation’s threat “in terms of a masculine English identity through castration” (188). Loughnane’s reading of the Old Lady has implications for both Wales and gender Shakespeare studies.

[. . .] It is fair to say that the Celtic character of many of Shakespeare’s plays is now well established and in consequence Shakespeare scholarship has been transformed. If any lingering doubt remained, Celtic Shakespeare should definitively settle it. Perhaps the next step is Archipelagic Shakespeare, though in truth the collection could just as easily have been called this. Many of the essays open new and interesting corridors to explore and further emphasise the likelihood that Shakespeare will eventually be seen “as the closest a fractured Britain had to a national poet” (216).

(Re-printed) BOOK Review by Christopher McMillan in 'The Year's Publications for 2013: A Selected List' in Scottish Literary Review, p.103

'A comprehensive, thought-provoking collection and a significant statement in the field of Shakespeare Studies and archipelagic studies more widely. The collection successfully continues what has been termed ‘the Celtic turn’ in Shakespeare Studies.'

REVIEW by David Hawkes in 'Recent Studies in the English Renaissance', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 53.1 (Winter, 2013), p. 236, excerpt.

"Among several intriguing essays, Rory Loughnane's piece on Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy stands out as especially instructive. The tragedy consists in the atheist D'Amville's failure to interpret earthly events as signs of divine dispensation, and Loughnane perspicaciously identifies an ethical critique of the literalist hermeneutics informing all of the play's action.

REVIEW by John R. Burton in The Year's Work in English Studies 2014(Oxford University Press), excerpt.

"Of particular interest to readers of this chapter, Rory Loughnane explores possible audience reception of Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy [1611], noting the apparent obfuscation of the play's didactic. It is the problems inherent in sign reception and interpretation that interest Loughnane, and he entertains two possibilities: Tourneur's play represents a misjudgement of the audience's subtle seveenteenth-century scepticism, or the author unwittingly encouraged a false interpretation of the play's central message.'

The penultimate discussion by Rory Loughnane concentrates upon the tableaux of artificial figures in the torture scenes of the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi. Loughnane carefully juxtaposes early modern constructions of the funeral effigy in therapeutic terms with the harrowing inversion of this practice in the torments of Webster’sprotagonist.

REVIEW by William E. Engel, Sewanee: The University of the South in Seventeenth Century News, excerpt.

"Rory Loughnane’s essay on artificial figures and the staging of remembrance in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi considers, among other things, the practicality of whether wax figures (of the Duchess’s husband and children) were constructed and presented on stage—probably not, given the unnecessary expense this would have incurred (226). What is of greater interest here, though, is his incisive treatment of the bewildering suspension of disbelief required of the audience while watching the players of those roles pretend to be artificial figures. Loughnane perspicaciously sees this as an innovation on Webster’s part: to draw together two familiar practices of meta-theatre; namely, the display of suddenly revealed or misrecognized dead bodies and the dramatized practice of remembrance. Meticulously and judiciously examined here, the allusive and illusive qualities of Webster’s staging of this pivotal scene “offers a paradigm of theatre as remembrance of the dead” (212)."